Identifying America’s Most Just Companies

The concept of a “just” company can be very difficult to define. Fortunately for Forbes and JUST Capital, an organization that tracks business activities for investors and consumers, NORC’s Behavioral and Economic Analysis and Decision-Making (BEAD) team was up to the task. BEAD refined a set of metrics that informed Forbes’s 2017 ranking of America’s most just companies. Using data collected through AmeriSpeak, NORC created the evaluation metrics and derived relative weights for the importance of the U.S. population’s attitudes about the drivers of corporate justness. The selection of companies draws from the Russell 1000 Index, which represents over 90 percent of the U.S. stock market value. This work led to the publication by Forbes magazine of the JUST 100 list.